A leap of faith: Neumann’s last-second decision to play volleyball at Lamar pays off

SANDPOINT — As Kayla Neumann wrapped up her second year at North Idaho College last spring, it looked like she was finally going to walk away from the sport of volleyball.

The 2017 Sandpoint grad spent that entire semester thinking that every time she stepped in the gym she was one day closer to the end of her collegiate career.

During the summer, Neumann decided she wanted to do some traveling and continue her education online so she could figure out if there was anything in this world she was more passionate about than volleyball. She didn’t touch a volleyball or train during that time frame and in her mind had taken a hiatus from a sport she’s been playing her whole life.

However, all of the sudden Neumann decided she wasn’t finished with volleyball.

“I had just come to realize that I wasn’t ready to quit,” she said, “and that there will always be opportunities but I can never go back and play volleyball again ... I had to get back out there and I knew that whatever life had to offer could wait.”

Neumann was satisfied with the way she ended her time at NIC, helping lead the Cardinals to an East Region championship while earning Player of the Year honors as a freshman. But she believed she had more in her and the potential to compete at the Division I level.

“Once I had decided then I pushed the gas pedal and just went for it,” she said.

The first person Neumann called when she changed her mind was Jack Dyck, the Sandpoint athletic director from 1992-2004. Dyck coached club volleyball for 35 years and grew a close connection with the Neumann family during the course of it. Dyck worked with Neumann in volleyball camps when she was younger and got the chance to be her head coach in Neumann’s senior year of club volleyball.

Neumann reached out to Dyck hoping to get an honest answer from him on her potential at the Division I level. Dyck provided her with a vote of confidence and Neumann began the process of finding a school just a few weeks before the season began.

About 30 schools from around the country got back to Neumann but she narrowed down her list to two schools — a university in Alaska and Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. The recruiting process lasted about five days before Neumann signed with Lamar. She quickly packed her bags, shipped her car and headed to Texas. The process went so fast that Neumann didn’t have the chance to tell some of her immediate family where she was headed.

Neumann moved into the dorms at Lamar on Aug. 21, five days before classes began. It was a hectic few weeks but Neumann quickly became attached to the campus and had no second thoughts on the decision despite some initial uncertainty from her parents.

“I stepped off the plane and I remember I opened up my Google Maps,” she said, “and I zoomed out and I looked at how far I was visually away from home. That brought a wave of a little bit of fear but any fear I encountered I just turned it around and used it as motivation.”

Neumann didn’t even do any research on the university before committing, but she feels like it was meant to be.

Neumann wanted to go to a place that was completely different than North Idaho and Beaumont, Texas, certainly gave her that. The first week at Lamar, Neumann felt the full brunt of a Texas summer and was sick due to heat exhaustion.

“There was just something in me that really wanted to get away from everything that I was familiar to,” she said.

When Neumann arrived at Lamar, she planned on redshirting her first season because she felt she would be behind with not having an offseason to build chemistry with her teammates. But, she ended up starting in the team’s first official preseason game and learned how intense the play was.

“I realized pretty quickly that it’s a whole different ball game and I needed to get up to speed and I needed to do it fast,” she said.

Neumann sat out the Cardinals first few matches of the regular season to do just that and master the coaches system. But once she saw the court again on Sept. 24, it was clear she belonged.

Neumann appeared in 17 games for Lamar this season, starting nine of them and recording the fourth most kills and points on the team.

Neumann gave credit to Dyck for helping her believe in herself and she said she owes a lot of the success she has seen so far to him.

“He has been so influential in my volleyball career,” she said about Dyck. “I’ve always admired him.”

Dyck said Neumann did everything she could to make this opportunity at Lamar possible for herself by contacting so many schools and showing them how much she wanted to keep playing volleyball.

Dyck said he knew Neumann had the physical skills and the mentality to compete at the Division I level before she graduated high school, she just didn’t get the attention of schools — a byproduct of living in North Idaho.

“It’s that extra competitive gene where you don’t just want to beat somebody but you want to beat them soundly so they understand they were beaten by you — she had that,” he said. “She’s just another in a line of really good Sandpoint volleyball players that we’ve had over the years.”

Now Neumann is back home in Sandpoint after the coronavirus outbreak forced the 21-year-old to move out of the dorms and away from a place she had started to grow a deep affection for.

“It was a tough decision to move that far away from home in the first place so to retract those steps I’d say was even harder,” she said. “I fell in love with Texas. I love being there, I love my coaches and I love my teammates. It’s hard because it’s time stolen away.”

But Neumann is enjoying catching up with family while doing everything she can do to keep her hands on a volleyball. Neumann said she has been watching videos April Ross, a two-time Olympic beach volleyball medalist, has been posting on her Instagram throughout the quarantine to stay sharp. One exercise Neumann is particularly keen on doing for an hour a day is peppering a volleyball against a wooden board.

Neumann is a general studies major but is already thinking about playing volleyball overseas once she wraps up her senior season next spring. She hopes to carry Lamar to a better record next season under a new head coach and help the team make a run at an NCAA tournament bid.

“I just want to walk out of the fall season knowing we gave it everything we could,” she said.